If one has a great sorrow, it is a good thing to change one’s abode. She came here, to the hotel I am writing about, basically because it is owned by the same company as the hotel in Paris. This is where she bought her wedding band, this is where she became known as Madame Annette, and as a consequence, came into an easier roster of duties. She is now, so to speak, the right hand of the housekeeper, has only five or six rooms to clean, and the girls on two floors under her wing. She no longer wears a blue dress, but a black one, and is not compelled to wear the customary white bonnet. But she likes to wear it just the same — out of a coquettishness she claims is modesty. She is extremely pretty. Yes, it seems to me that sometimes she doesn’t realize herself how beautiful she is capable of being. Because to be aware of one’s own beauty requires free time and a measure of material independence. Sometimes I think a man must tell her:
“Listen to me, Madame Annette (or even just plain Annette!), with your black hair, your pale grey eyes and your tan complexion you are a rare composition of nature. Even though you only wear silk stockings on Wednesdays, which are your day off, one can observe the charming curve of your leg on other days as well, the soft transition from the muscle of the calf to the sinew of the ankle. Don’t imagine that your narrow hips, small breasts and strong, hard-working but shapely hands mark you out to the observer as not belonging to the social class you take for superior. You are easily capable of passing for a lady, even when you are just taking instructions, your bright eyes on a guest and then lingering in the empty space behind his turned back, your narrow, strangely red mouth (for which, with your complexion, you should really use a lighter shade of lipstick) pressed shut, as though to ward off any inappropriate behaviour, and your soft chin slightly upraised, as though that was the seat of attention, but also of pride. There’s no doubting your beauty, Annette!”
Unfortunately, it’s not likely that anyone has spoken to her in such a way. The mirrors she likes to stop in front of are satisfactory but silent. And time is brief and nimble. Annette has some superficial practice in tidying up. The washstand takes her five minutes, the bed three, the table two. Gentlemen like to leave their suits draped over chair backs. That creates complications. In addition there are papers, books, letters on the desk. The hotel rules forbid meddling with guests’ informal arrangements. But the room still needs to be cleaned. Each piece of paper has to stay where it is. That can take up to twenty minutes! Then she has to supervise her girls. They’re such chatterboxes, the signals go off, green and persistent, and they simply ignore them. Annette has to bring them up to the mark. She works from twelve noon to nine at night. One hour off for lunch. Downstairs, next to the kitchen, at the long staff table that reminds you of mealtimes in an orphanage. If Annette goes on working so hard, she will surely make it to housekeeper herself — and will be able to go on working.
One day, a Wednesday, I ran into her outside one of the big cinemas. She was looking at the stills, scenes from a rich background. (Nothing is so interesting to the poor as the lives of the rich.) I permitted myself, since we had known each other for so long, to treat her. We saw one of those films that pass for “socially conscious”. One of those films in which a well-off young man persistently tries to take a poor girl to supper, when she doesn’t know whether you eat ice-cream with a fork, or use a nutcracker on an apple. The audience of course knows, and brays its approval to the film industry. At least on that evening, it was braying. Madame Annette said: “Don’t you think that girl might have learned a thing or two from films? Surely she’ll have been to the cinema, seeing as the film is set in New York.”
Thereupon — from a slightly hasty, slightly honest reaction against the whole business — I asked Madame Annette to accompany me to dinner in a good restaurant. Here and there sat a guest from the hotel. Here and there an appraising look brushed Madame Annette, not a recognizing one — because a real gentleman never imagines a chambermaid could be sitting in the same restaurant as himself. En passant, I make mention of the fact that Madame Annette was wearing a dark high-necked dress that made her look pale, and her mouth even redder — and a string of artificial pearls that threw a silvery-blue reflection on the lower half of her yellow-brown face. What seems more important to me is to stress that she handled her cutlery better than those men in the film industry with whom I have had occasion to eat, or as they like to say, to “dine”.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 February 1929
44. The Patron
It is among the characteristics of the hotel manager that it’s not possible to tell his age. The observer is mystified to see a fifty-year-old hotel manager at eleven in the morning, who by three o’clock will be a dashing forty, and late at night, fifty again, as he was in the morning. Not as rapidly as his physiognomy, but still remarkably fast are the changes in his hair and beard. There are times when little threads of silver seem to infiltrate his coal-black moustache. A couple of days later they are gone. Sometimes one seems to catch the hair on his head beginning to thin. Then a day or two later, there it is again, in all its familiar silky, almost feminine abundance.
Even though he is the utterly cosmopolitan manager of an utterly cosmopolitan hotel, the staff only ever refers to him as le patron. Maybe it’s a challenge to the poor employees, even though they spend their whole lifetimes in the vicinity of modern capital, to conceive of a publicly owned company as their bread-giver, to serve an abstract notion sprung from thin ribbons of tickertape; and to see the man who hires and fires them, who orders them to do one thing and forbids them to do something else, merely as the employee of a mysterious joint-stock company. It’s simpler to take him for a “patron”. If he were the actual owner, yes, even if he were only a shareholder, then — that’s my sense of him — he surely wouldn’t stand for the populist, provincial, and faintly demeaning title of “patron”. But as things stand, the director is quite pleased, even a little flattered, to be addressed as “patron”.
Such secrets of his soul as I sometimes think I can guess at, along with other, more evident traits of his, have long kept me from warming to the director as I would have liked. Writerly objectivity demands a certain sympathy for the person one describes, a literary sympathy, that in certain circumstances can even be expended on a louse. But my private heart beats in a sentimental (and now rather unfashionable) way for the lesser beings who are given orders and who obey, obey, obey, and rarely allows me to feel anything but objectivity for the others who order, order, order. As far as the director is concerned, then, I sometimes repeat the extenuating circumstance: he too receives orders; only from his shareholders! But the orders he receives are given him once a year, and they hold good for all 365 days, they are general instructions, written down on thick paper, almost like official documents. He can impart them to those below as he thinks fit, and if they seem harsh, as often, he can make them still harsher, which does something to make his own lot seem easier to him by comparison. Insofar as the ladder leading up to the company board is visible, then he, the director, is on its topmost rung.